There was one email from someone that asked if I had movies on my site and I told the truth in my deposition that is what you should do right tell the truth and that is all I do always on my site.
Telling the truth isn't enough. You should tell the whole truth. Maybe not all the time, but certainly under oath and in a business transaction.
In any case, if you always told the truth, then why did you say that people could download LoTR III if the movie wasn't even made yet?
So you sound like you like the MPAA you sure do talk just like them reading between the lines and only point out what looks good for the MPAA.
I'm just pointing out what wasn't already pointed out by the slanted article that was linked to. I explicitly said I don't like the MPAA in my post above.
The fact is the MPAA made a very big mistake and are trying to cover it up and I will not let them.
If the MPAA admitted that they made a mistake would you have dropped your lawsuit? They obviously made a mistake. They're just saying it was an honest mistake.
Note see how they do not post news about them winning in the courts
It's not newsworthy. I'm sure they have crazy people sue them all the time.
I did not promise anyone movies on my site you are reading between the lines like the courts and the MPAA.
You tricked people into thinking they could download movies from your site. According to the court documents you've even admitted this. In my opinion you did so intentionally in order to make a profit.
I emailed my ISP and told them I did not have movies and they knew I did not have movies too and still close my site down saying they would not back up a site that only pays them $10 a month.
Makes sense. If you want someone to put their legal ass on the line for you, you should probably be paying them more than $10/month.
I did file a counter-notification and it is in the case and was submited to the courts and the courts keep over looking it.
According to your own lawyer, in his brief to the court of appeals, "Mr. Rossi's letter to Mr. Wong fulfills the essence of the counter-notification requirements, with the exception of the express consent to local federal court jurisdiction." (emphasis is mine)
MPAA was trying to put me out of business
Of course they were, you were trying to profit off of their hard work by tricking people into thinking you had copies of their movies on your website.
I have a right to say what ever I please any time and any where I like.
But the MPAA are not? After all, you're suing them for saying something to your ISP.
Again, IANAL, but I seem to remember that contracts must be done in good faith: depending on the jurisdiction, arbitrary termination is not consider good faith.
Maybe. I should have said you're probably screwed. It all depends on the jurisdiction and the details of the specific case. In New Jersey, for instance, I believe the contract has to be illegal (as in telling someone to do illegal things, e.g. a contract to kill someone) or "unconscionable" to be unenforcible. Terminating someone's contract (and presumably refunding them for any unused time) because you believe that you are going to be subject to a lawsuit if you don't doesn't seem unconscionable to me, regardless of whether or not it turns out you were technically right.
Did you "consent to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which [you] reside"? Because the court documents say you didn't.
Here you're wrong as well. Assuming that he was not violating the law, this is a significant first ammendment issue. The MPAA can't stifle his right to free speech on the off chance that he might be violating the law.
Well. 1) The MPAA didn't stifle his speech. They convinced the ISP to stop facilitating his speech. 2) Even if the MPAA did stifle his speech, it still wouldn't be a First Amendment issue, because the First Amendment applies to government abridgement of speech. If I cover your mouth while you're trying to talk, I've committed assault, not violated the Constitution. Likewise, if I convince your ISP to take down your website, I (might have) committed tortious interference, but I certainly haven't violated the Constitution. If a court ordered the ISP to take down the website then it'd be a Constitutional issue. Even if the DMCA required the ISP to take down the website it might be a Constitutional issue. But the DMCA doesn't require this, it just provides the ISP with immunity from prosecution if they do.
The guy claimed to have the movies available on his website. In order for the MPAA to check whether or not he was lying (as it turns out he was), they'd have to have paid the guy money to sign up for hihs "service". That's probably why they didn't bother.
I agree with much of what you have to say, but here I disagree. You should have some proof of wrongdoing before you sue.
Well, 1) I didn't say what they did was right, I just said that's probably why they did it; and 2) they didn't sue, they just threatened to sue.
The fact that they couldn't be bothered to verify his (easily verifiable) claims makes this a reasonable lawsuit.
It was a reasonable lawsuit. I'm not even sure the 9th Circuit made the right decision. But going to the Supreme Court with it is just over the top. There isn't a Constitutional issue here. The Constitution doesn't guarantee you the right to sue someone for lying to your ISP. The First Amendment doesn't go that far.
One thing that we do know is that the MPAA committed perjury
Perjury requires bad faith. The 9th Circuit ruled that the MPAA was acting in good faith. Frankly, without reading the actual takedown notice (which I couldn't find), I can't say for sure.
So, it seems to me that the one side that can conclusively be proven to have broken the law is the MPAA.
I certainly don't think it was "conclusively proven". According to the 9th Circuit, in fact, it was conclusively proven that they didn't break the law. I wouldn't go that far, but then again I haven't seen all the facts, just the brief by the plaintiff and the ruling.
By the way, here's a Do-It-Yourself Counter Notification Letter. Be sure to use it to mitigate your damages if the **AA ever comes after you for something you didn't do.
The DMCA goes slightly overboard with its power in regards to server shutdowns, but it isn't that horribly unfair with regards to copywrited material on a server. [Its horribly unfair in other ways though...]
Where the DMCA is most horrible is section 512(h), which allows any clerk to issue a subpoena. The parts about server shutdowns are a good thing. They limit the ability of the MPAA to sue the ISPs if the ISPs follow certain rules. Without the DMCA the MPAA would still be sending cease and desist orders, and ISPs would still be taking down content based on those ceasae and desist orders. This provision of the DMCA (the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act) has gotten a bad rap but it's way better than nothing, and frankly I think it's an excellent solution since it allows the publisher to file a counter-notification which keeps his/her site up despite a cease and desist order (Rossi didn't file a counter-notification, that was his big mistake).
Note the "good faith" provision -- this is where things have been going wrong, and it is not a problem with the DMCA.
Yes, and I'm somewhat disturbed from the fact that the ninth circuit declared the MPAA to be acting in good faith here. But let's be realistic here, Rossi's website said "Join to download full length movies online now! new movies every month"; "Full Length Downloadable Movies"; and "NOW DOWNLOADABLE." He was asking for it, and had this not been the case I'm hopeful (maybe naiively) that the ninth circuit decision would have gone the other way.
It strongly appears that certain agencies are automating searches for material and aren't manually checking the results before sending letters.
It looks like in this case they checked things manually, but the supposed download files weren't available unless you signed up for an account. Personally I tend to side with Rossi that it was bad faith to not sign up for an account and actually download the files, but this doesn't seem to have been explored during the case. I can see reasons for the MPAA not to want to do this, after all.
The only "fix" I can see is a grace period for the site's owner to reply to the possible copyright infringement before the site is taken down.
The DMCA provides for a counter-notification. Rossi never exercised it. His lawyer said that's because no one ever told him he had the right, but ignorance is no excuse for the law.
The other problem that I am hearing about is that ISPs are taking down sites without valid takedown notices. If I'm reading the law right, this should violate "safe harbor" provisions for ISPs, but I have yet to see an ISP prosecuted for this.
Generally when you sign up with an ISP they reserve the right to take your site down for any reason. Choosing to take your site down even though a proper takedown notice wasn't served doesn't violate the law directly, but the ISP wouldn't have the safe harbor provision to fall back on if they were then sued for breach of contract (but again, if the contract says they can take down your site for any reason, then you're screwed).
Why can a private organization just get a website (any website!) shut down without the facts being checked, without the owner of the site being asked to present his side of the story first, and without actually having to come up with proof that it does do something illegal?
That's something you should be asking the ISP. It's the ISP which chose to ignore him and shut down his site, after all. Of course, had Rossi sent in a proper counter-notification, the site never would have been taken down in the first place.
why does the MPAA actually lower itself to using false allegations?
The guy claimed to have the movies available on his website. In order for the MPAA to check whether or not he was lying (as it turns out he was), they'd have to have paid the guy money to sign up for hihs "service". That's probably why they didn't bother.
How can they accuse others of doing illegal or illegimate things when they do it themselves?
Well, according to the 9th circuit, they haven't done anything illegal or illegitimate.
And, in the light of that - why isn't this story on the frontpage?
Someone sued the MPAA and lost. They took the case to the 9th circuit court of appeals and lost. They plan to appeal to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will most likely reject the case. Why does it belong on the front page, because the lawyer is throwing around the phrase "first amendment"?
How could he make a movie available for download before it was even made?
Before it was finished. But LoTR was just one of many of the movies listed. The brief only mentions LoTR in one sentence, and the ruling doesn't mention it at all. It's not a very big part of the case.
I also can't have very much sympathy for this guy. He took money from people who signed up for his service which offered "Join to download full length movies online now! new movies every month"; "Full Length Downloadable Movies";
and "NOW DOWNLOADABLE." This asshole "even admitted that his own customers often believed that actual movies were available for downloading on his website." One lowlife battles a lowlife company to try to get rich quick, and only the ones who make anything are the lowlife lawyers.
the ability of copyright holders to make DMCA shutdown requests to ISPs, and then only in cases where no good-faith effort has been made
According to the 9th Circuit ruling, the MPAA did make a good faith effort. Specifically, they said that "the
district court properly found that no issue of material fact
existed as to MPAA's 'good faith belief' that Rossi's website
was infringing upon its copyrighted materials."
After my brief reading of the facts, I disagree with the 9th circuit here, but I highly doubt the Supreme Court is going to get involved in such relative minutiae. I'm not even convinced there's a Contitutional issue involved here. After all, the MPAA is not the government. They did something which was probably wrong - tortious interference of a contractual relationship, but they didn't directly violate any First Amendment rights, they merely threatened the guy's ISP causing them to refuse to help him publish his website.
I can see it now - "Cert denied". How the hell did this make it to the 9th circuit court of appeals in the first place? If the DMCA is unconstitutional, then what grounds does Rossi have for suing the RIAA for violating it? Maybe it's just PrimeZone Media that has no clue what it's talking about. I'm sure the Slashbots will jump on this though. I mean, the guys going up against the MPAA. He must be right!
How exactly is "location where spam emails are sent from" determined? If a spammer in China uses a zombie in the US, does that count under US or China? What percentage of open proxies are located in the United States? What percentage of home computers are located in the United States? These numbers raise more questions than they answer.
Is there anybody out there with a ten year old computer operating with its original OS and hard drive that was formatted only once...when it was new?
Not many, but how many people can say their car is 10 years old and never went into the shop? I think things are going to move the other way. People are going to accept that unless they are an expert in computers they aren't going to be able to get away with not taking the computer in for routine maintenance every few months. The price/performance ratio is starting to move to the point where this is feasible.
Interesting. I tried "5424" but all I got is "5424000000000000". I wonder if there are any valid credit card numbers on there. Can you say "potential privacy violation"?
Last time I moved I set up my laptop running Win2K on my new DSL connection without a firewall. It was just for 5-10 minutes or so, to set up the connection. Within those few minutes, I managed to pick up a worm. This was even with most of the latest patches already installed.
Firewalls/NAT greatly cuts down on your risk. Running firefox pretty much gets rid of the rest. But if you put Windows on the internet without a firewall and you're not a security expert who has done a thorough audit of your machine, you're asking for trouble.
If AOL was negligent in their security, then they can be held accountable for the damages that their users suffered.
Isn't AOL the one that suffered the damages? Even if so, I'm sure this is covered by the AOL service agreement, and besides, what steps would a reasonable person have taken that AOL didn't take? Someone has to have access to the user lists, after all.
It'd suck for him, but I doubt that's how it went down (since it was the prosecution arguing to accept the plea). But that's part of the reason why we allow judges to reject pleas which aren't based on the facts. You wouldn't want a murderer making a plea to jaywalking just because he knows the prosecutor or can pay him off or something like that.
He defrauded the AOL users, and the company, and fraud is most certainly a prosecutable offense.
Fraud generally requires deception. He didn't deceive the AOL users. One could argue that he defrauded AOL by entering into an employment contract with the intent of not obeying it, but that would require that you prove that he intended to get the list and sell it at the time he entered into the contract. Otherwise all you've got is breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets, both of which are only civil offenses in Virgina, AFAICT.
Trying him under the CAN-SPAM statute seems like a really poor legal strategy.
This was a federal prosecution, and federal prosecutors can only use federal law.
Slashdot Mirror
There was one email from someone that asked if I had movies on my site and I told the truth in my deposition that is what you should do right tell the truth and that is all I do always on my site.
Telling the truth isn't enough. You should tell the whole truth. Maybe not all the time, but certainly under oath and in a business transaction.
In any case, if you always told the truth, then why did you say that people could download LoTR III if the movie wasn't even made yet?
So you sound like you like the MPAA you sure do talk just like them reading between the lines and only point out what looks good for the MPAA.
I'm just pointing out what wasn't already pointed out by the slanted article that was linked to. I explicitly said I don't like the MPAA in my post above.
The fact is the MPAA made a very big mistake and are trying to cover it up and I will not let them.
If the MPAA admitted that they made a mistake would you have dropped your lawsuit? They obviously made a mistake. They're just saying it was an honest mistake.
Note see how they do not post news about them winning in the courts
It's not newsworthy. I'm sure they have crazy people sue them all the time.
I did not promise anyone movies on my site you are reading between the lines like the courts and the MPAA.
You tricked people into thinking they could download movies from your site. According to the court documents you've even admitted this. In my opinion you did so intentionally in order to make a profit.
I emailed my ISP and told them I did not have movies and they knew I did not have movies too and still close my site down saying they would not back up a site that only pays them $10 a month.
Makes sense. If you want someone to put their legal ass on the line for you, you should probably be paying them more than $10/month.
I did file a counter-notification and it is in the case and was submited to the courts and the courts keep over looking it.
According to your own lawyer, in his brief to the court of appeals, "Mr. Rossi's letter to Mr. Wong fulfills the essence of the counter-notification requirements, with the exception of the express consent to local federal court jurisdiction." (emphasis is mine)
MPAA was trying to put me out of business
Of course they were, you were trying to profit off of their hard work by tricking people into thinking you had copies of their movies on your website.
I have a right to say what ever I please any time and any where I like.
But the MPAA are not? After all, you're suing them for saying something to your ISP.
Again, IANAL, but I seem to remember that contracts must be done in good faith: depending on the jurisdiction, arbitrary termination is not consider good faith.
Maybe. I should have said you're probably screwed. It all depends on the jurisdiction and the details of the specific case. In New Jersey, for instance, I believe the contract has to be illegal (as in telling someone to do illegal things, e.g. a contract to kill someone) or "unconscionable" to be unenforcible. Terminating someone's contract (and presumably refunding them for any unused time) because you believe that you are going to be subject to a lawsuit if you don't doesn't seem unconscionable to me, regardless of whether or not it turns out you were technically right.
Did you "consent to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which [you] reside"? Because the court documents say you didn't.
Here you're wrong as well. Assuming that he was not violating the law, this is a significant first ammendment issue. The MPAA can't stifle his right to free speech on the off chance that he might be violating the law.
Well. 1) The MPAA didn't stifle his speech. They convinced the ISP to stop facilitating his speech. 2) Even if the MPAA did stifle his speech, it still wouldn't be a First Amendment issue, because the First Amendment applies to government abridgement of speech. If I cover your mouth while you're trying to talk, I've committed assault, not violated the Constitution. Likewise, if I convince your ISP to take down your website, I (might have) committed tortious interference, but I certainly haven't violated the Constitution. If a court ordered the ISP to take down the website then it'd be a Constitutional issue. Even if the DMCA required the ISP to take down the website it might be a Constitutional issue. But the DMCA doesn't require this, it just provides the ISP with immunity from prosecution if they do.
The guy claimed to have the movies available on his website. In order for the MPAA to check whether or not he was lying (as it turns out he was), they'd have to have paid the guy money to sign up for hihs "service". That's probably why they didn't bother.
I agree with much of what you have to say, but here I disagree. You should have some proof of wrongdoing before you sue.
Well, 1) I didn't say what they did was right, I just said that's probably why they did it; and 2) they didn't sue, they just threatened to sue.
The fact that they couldn't be bothered to verify his (easily verifiable) claims makes this a reasonable lawsuit.
It was a reasonable lawsuit. I'm not even sure the 9th Circuit made the right decision. But going to the Supreme Court with it is just over the top. There isn't a Constitutional issue here. The Constitution doesn't guarantee you the right to sue someone for lying to your ISP. The First Amendment doesn't go that far.
One thing that we do know is that the MPAA committed perjury
Perjury requires bad faith. The 9th Circuit ruled that the MPAA was acting in good faith. Frankly, without reading the actual takedown notice (which I couldn't find), I can't say for sure.
So, it seems to me that the one side that can conclusively be proven to have broken the law is the MPAA.
I certainly don't think it was "conclusively proven". According to the 9th Circuit, in fact, it was conclusively proven that they didn't break the law. I wouldn't go that far, but then again I haven't seen all the facts, just the brief by the plaintiff and the ruling.
By the way, here's a Do-It-Yourself Counter Notification Letter. Be sure to use it to mitigate your damages if the **AA ever comes after you for something you didn't do.
The DMCA goes slightly overboard with its power in regards to server shutdowns, but it isn't that horribly unfair with regards to copywrited material on a server. [Its horribly unfair in other ways though...]
Where the DMCA is most horrible is section 512(h), which allows any clerk to issue a subpoena. The parts about server shutdowns are a good thing. They limit the ability of the MPAA to sue the ISPs if the ISPs follow certain rules. Without the DMCA the MPAA would still be sending cease and desist orders, and ISPs would still be taking down content based on those ceasae and desist orders. This provision of the DMCA (the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act) has gotten a bad rap but it's way better than nothing, and frankly I think it's an excellent solution since it allows the publisher to file a counter-notification which keeps his/her site up despite a cease and desist order (Rossi didn't file a counter-notification, that was his big mistake).
Note the "good faith" provision -- this is where things have been going wrong, and it is not a problem with the DMCA.
Yes, and I'm somewhat disturbed from the fact that the ninth circuit declared the MPAA to be acting in good faith here. But let's be realistic here, Rossi's website said "Join to download full length movies online now! new movies every month"; "Full Length Downloadable Movies"; and "NOW DOWNLOADABLE." He was asking for it, and had this not been the case I'm hopeful (maybe naiively) that the ninth circuit decision would have gone the other way.
It strongly appears that certain agencies are automating searches for material and aren't manually checking the results before sending letters.
It looks like in this case they checked things manually, but the supposed download files weren't available unless you signed up for an account. Personally I tend to side with Rossi that it was bad faith to not sign up for an account and actually download the files, but this doesn't seem to have been explored during the case. I can see reasons for the MPAA not to want to do this, after all.
The only "fix" I can see is a grace period for the site's owner to reply to the possible copyright infringement before the site is taken down.
The DMCA provides for a counter-notification. Rossi never exercised it. His lawyer said that's because no one ever told him he had the right, but ignorance is no excuse for the law.
The other problem that I am hearing about is that ISPs are taking down sites without valid takedown notices. If I'm reading the law right, this should violate "safe harbor" provisions for ISPs, but I have yet to see an ISP prosecuted for this.
Generally when you sign up with an ISP they reserve the right to take your site down for any reason. Choosing to take your site down even though a proper takedown notice wasn't served doesn't violate the law directly, but the ISP wouldn't have the safe harbor provision to fall back on if they were then sued for breach of contract (but again, if the contract says they can take down your site for any reason, then you're screwed).
Why can a private organization just get a website (any website!) shut down without the facts being checked, without the owner of the site being asked to present his side of the story first, and without actually having to come up with proof that it does do something illegal?
That's something you should be asking the ISP. It's the ISP which chose to ignore him and shut down his site, after all. Of course, had Rossi sent in a proper counter-notification, the site never would have been taken down in the first place.
why does the MPAA actually lower itself to using false allegations?
The guy claimed to have the movies available on his website. In order for the MPAA to check whether or not he was lying (as it turns out he was), they'd have to have paid the guy money to sign up for hihs "service". That's probably why they didn't bother.
How can they accuse others of doing illegal or illegimate things when they do it themselves?
Well, according to the 9th circuit, they haven't done anything illegal or illegitimate.
And, in the light of that - why isn't this story on the frontpage?
Someone sued the MPAA and lost. They took the case to the 9th circuit court of appeals and lost. They plan to appeal to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will most likely reject the case. Why does it belong on the front page, because the lawyer is throwing around the phrase "first amendment"?
Let him spend the money he scammed the people registering for his website out of.
How could he make a movie available for download before it was even made?
Before it was finished. But LoTR was just one of many of the movies listed. The brief only mentions LoTR in one sentence, and the ruling doesn't mention it at all. It's not a very big part of the case.
I also can't have very much sympathy for this guy. He took money from people who signed up for his service which offered "Join to download full length movies online now! new movies every month"; "Full Length Downloadable Movies"; and "NOW DOWNLOADABLE." This asshole "even admitted that his own customers often believed that actual movies were available for downloading on his website." One lowlife battles a lowlife company to try to get rich quick, and only the ones who make anything are the lowlife lawyers.
That a private organization could/can autonomously demand that an ISP shutdown a site without due process is repugnant in the extreme.
What's repugnant is that the ISP listened to them.
the ability of copyright holders to make DMCA shutdown requests to ISPs, and then only in cases where no good-faith effort has been made
According to the 9th Circuit ruling, the MPAA did make a good faith effort. Specifically, they said that "the district court properly found that no issue of material fact existed as to MPAA's 'good faith belief' that Rossi's website was infringing upon its copyrighted materials."
After my brief reading of the facts, I disagree with the 9th circuit here, but I highly doubt the Supreme Court is going to get involved in such relative minutiae. I'm not even convinced there's a Contitutional issue involved here. After all, the MPAA is not the government. They did something which was probably wrong - tortious interference of a contractual relationship, but they didn't directly violate any First Amendment rights, they merely threatened the guy's ISP causing them to refuse to help him publish his website.
I almost responded to this. Then I realized it was posted by an anonymous troll.
I can see it now - "Cert denied". How the hell did this make it to the 9th circuit court of appeals in the first place? If the DMCA is unconstitutional, then what grounds does Rossi have for suing the RIAA for violating it? Maybe it's just PrimeZone Media that has no clue what it's talking about. I'm sure the Slashbots will jump on this though. I mean, the guys going up against the MPAA. He must be right!
How exactly is "location where spam emails are sent from" determined? If a spammer in China uses a zombie in the US, does that count under US or China? What percentage of open proxies are located in the United States? What percentage of home computers are located in the United States? These numbers raise more questions than they answer.
Just proof that laws aren't the solution. The vast majority of spam is sent in violation of the law.
Is there anybody out there with a ten year old computer operating with its original OS and hard drive that was formatted only once...when it was new?
Not many, but how many people can say their car is 10 years old and never went into the shop? I think things are going to move the other way. People are going to accept that unless they are an expert in computers they aren't going to be able to get away with not taking the computer in for routine maintenance every few months. The price/performance ratio is starting to move to the point where this is feasible.
I don't really think there's too much point in getting concerned just yet.
In other words, you can expect the UN to start work on a treaty and the United States to refuse to sign it.
Interesting. I tried "5424" but all I got is "5424000000000000". I wonder if there are any valid credit card numbers on there. Can you say "potential privacy violation"?
Last time I moved I set up my laptop running Win2K on my new DSL connection without a firewall. It was just for 5-10 minutes or so, to set up the connection. Within those few minutes, I managed to pick up a worm. This was even with most of the latest patches already installed.
Firewalls/NAT greatly cuts down on your risk. Running firefox pretty much gets rid of the rest. But if you put Windows on the internet without a firewall and you're not a security expert who has done a thorough audit of your machine, you're asking for trouble.
If AOL was negligent in their security, then they can be held accountable for the damages that their users suffered.
Isn't AOL the one that suffered the damages? Even if so, I'm sure this is covered by the AOL service agreement, and besides, what steps would a reasonable person have taken that AOL didn't take? Someone has to have access to the user lists, after all.
goods, wares, merchandise, securities or money
I'm not convinced that information falls under "goods, wares, merchandise, securities or money", but depending on the definitions maybe it does.
It'd suck for him, but I doubt that's how it went down (since it was the prosecution arguing to accept the plea). But that's part of the reason why we allow judges to reject pleas which aren't based on the facts. You wouldn't want a murderer making a plea to jaywalking just because he knows the prosecutor or can pay him off or something like that.
He defrauded the AOL users, and the company, and fraud is most certainly a prosecutable offense.
Fraud generally requires deception. He didn't deceive the AOL users. One could argue that he defrauded AOL by entering into an employment contract with the intent of not obeying it, but that would require that you prove that he intended to get the list and sell it at the time he entered into the contract. Otherwise all you've got is breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets, both of which are only civil offenses in Virgina, AFAICT.
Trying him under the CAN-SPAM statute seems like a really poor legal strategy.
This was a federal prosecution, and federal prosecutors can only use federal law.